Health Care Financing Update

In Havana, you can't get a good cigar. On the North/South Korean border the North Korean guards are facing north to prevent escapes. And the Canadian Premier of Newfoundland and Labrador came to the United States for heart surgery. This is all you need to know about communism and socialized medicine, respectively.

Meanwhile leftism (also known as liberalism, but not in this space) continues to blame the benighted sots of the voting public for not knowing that Obamacare is good for them, along with all the other do-gooder schemes of the left. Slate has the latest entry in this genre. Obama himself is selling this snake oil, starting with his state of the union and continuing to peddle the lie that if we just understand the details of his wonderful proposals, we would love the bill. In fact the opposite has been proved, the more people learn about the proposed health care funding legislation, the less they like it. But Obama somehow claims that "evil" insurance companies have a bigger megaphone than the President of the United States and have drown out his message. Meanwhile the Wall Street Journal savages big pharma for playing footsie with the Dems and details how they will get screwed anyway.

Pfizer CEO Jeffrey Kindler: It wasn't good enough to screw the citizens of New London, twice, but I really want to screw all Americans to benefit my company.

Meanwhile, Obama appears not to have given up on the legislation. I am not sure what is driving him, but I think the more focuses on health care the more of a disaster the mid-term elections will be for his party. I am conflicted, because if any bill is passed, no matter how watered down, it is going to be a bad bill. However, watching the slow motion self destruction by the Democrats in trying to achieve this Pyrrhic victory elicits a certain schadenfreude. As is noted in the NYT article, the chances do not appear very good that any legislation will emerge. From the article:

In his rallying cry to a crowd of cheering supporters on Thursday, Mr. Obama described, in the clearest terms yet, his vision of how to enact comprehensive health legislation: House and Senate Democrats would resolve their differences and decide on a “final bill.” They would then invite “our Republican friends to present their ideas.” The president would convene a meeting of Democrats, Republicans and health care experts to debate the proposals, in plain-spoken terms, for the benefit of the American people.

Then, Mr. Obama said, “we have got to move forward on a vote.”

The president did not say how he would resolve the knotty questions of policy, procedure and politics facing Congress.

The President just isn't very smart, I have decided. His vision is so incompatible with the manner in which the Senate and House actually operate that he should know this is unworkable. If so, one must think him a cynic of the first order, but I am not so sure and it scares me to think he believes his own junior high level of understanding of the political process.